BEFORE: Today I had my first encounter with the effects of the Corona virus (sorry, Covid-19) since my boss left for an appearance at a college in North Carolina, and the plan was for him to, upon returning to New York on Thursday, board a plane two hours later leaving from the same airport to fly to France for another event. Which meant I wouldn't see him for a week, and could get some work done at the office without the distractions of doing other little odd jobs for him all day long. Only when he left for North Carolina, he forgot to bring the folder with him that had the Paris travel info, despite my mentioning many times that he would have to bring everything needed for both trips with him on the first trip. So I dashed to the post office to send the folder by Express Mail to his North Carolina hotel, and then later I got the e-mail saying that the Paris event was cancelled. So now he'll be back on Friday instead of Tuesday, and I wasted money on postage for something that didn't need to be mailed.
But it seems they're not dealing with the effects of the virus in Europe as well as we are in the U.S. - and by the effects I don't even mean the illness, I mean the paranoia and the political wrangling over how best to deal with a viral illness. I'm in my early 50's, but fairly confident that I could ride out a flu-like viral illness, so I'm willing to take my chances. But, on the other hand, if the medical community decides that maybe everyone should stay home from work for a couple of weeks until this all boils over, JUST so those that have it don't end up spreading it to the ones that don't, well, I'm willing to make that sacrifice, too. Look, I've got food and beer at home, movies to watch and three weeks of comic books to catch up on, not to mention chores around the house that I would love to pretend to get to. So I'm all for shutting everything down (school, work, all social events) for two weeks (OK, three, tops) while we all get a handle on the Corona virus. Who's with me?
It's Day 3 (out of 3) for Reese Witherspoon movies, as she carries over from "Just Like Heaven". I blocked out my films for the rest of March, what I'm going to watch if - sorry, WHEN - this romance chain eventually ends.
THE PLOT: Life for a single mom in Los Angeles takes an unexpected turn when she allows three young guys to move in with her.
AFTER: Another film that I had NOT been looking forward to, because I remembered the commercials that ran in 2017 when the film got released, and they made the film seem terrible. Without knowing any details of how the three men came to live in this house with a family, it just seemed so contrived, so sitcom-like, I was prepared to hate this film. And it turned to be very contrived, only I didn't hate it so much. That's why we have to play out the games, because often my first impression of a film could be a wrong one. (I'm probably right more often than I'm wrong about which films I'm going to like, but I read the three Witherspoon films all wrong, the one that I thought I would like the most, "How Do You Know", just left me scratching my head, asking "How Do You Make a Movie Like THAT?")
Sure, this is a contrived situation - single Mom Alice goes out for a birthday night on the town with friends, and they party with three male friends who just HAPPEN to be working on pitching their own independent movie idea, and then they all end up passed out at Alice's house, which just HAPPENS to have a spare guest house that nobody is using, and Alice's deceased dad just HAPPENS to have been a famous filmmaker that the young guys admire, and they flatter Alice's mom just enough so that she HAPPENS to suggest that they stay in the guest house while they finish their screenplay. Because, you see, the young men just HAPPEN to have been thrown out of their last apartment, earlier that very same day. Whoof, that's a lot of happen-stances - one can almost see the divine hand of the screenwriter bringing all these random elements together to form a near perfect storm of coincidence.
Oh, yeah, Alice just HAPPENS to be separated from her husband, who's a band manager back in New York, and she recently moved back to L.A. with her two daughters. So having three young men hanging around the same house seems like a totally terrible idea, except then it isn't, because they get along well with her daughters, provide some kind of missing stable male influence in their lives, and one can even help her older daughter with writing a one-act play for school. The fact that one of the three men is romantically interested in Alice doesn't hurt either.
Alice's ex, meanwhile, thinks it's a terrible idea to have three male strangers crashing at the house where his daughters live (and he doesn't even know that one is sleeping with his wife) so it forces him to come to L.A. and investigate the situation. Another coincidence that it takes this situation to spend time with his own family, something he should have been doing more of in the first place, perhaps. And if you thought things were tense in the house before, just wait until Alice's husband shows up, and everything comes to a boil.
But fortunately, the situation also finds ways to be more charming than inconvenient, and that's really saying something - you start to maybe think that maybe things are going to work out for the best, whatever that specifically means, though, is a little up-for-grabs. Having three extra sets of hands around to pick up the kids when needed, cook dinner occasionally and, umm, spend time with after hours (that one guy in particular, thankfully Alice isn't sleeping with all three of them...) turns out to be just what the family needs, again, in a very coincidental, barely-believable sort of way.
So it's not a Shakespearean drama, but neither is it a silly bedroom farce, it's sort of right down the middle. A film that acknowledges that it's tough to be a single parent, also tough to be separated from your spouse while you try to figure out the next direction to go in life. I'm sure this strikes a chord with at least a certain segment of the population. For that matter, it's tough to pitch a screenplay, it's tough to work with a writing partner, it's tough to design a web-site for your decorating business, and it's tough to drive a stick-shift. But at least everyone in this film is trying to do the best that they can, and that's not nothing.
Also starring Michael Sheen (last seen in "Norman"), Candice Bergen (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), Pico Alexander (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Jon Rudnitsky, Nat Wolff (last seen in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"), Lola Flanery, Eden Grace Redfield (last seen in "The Glass Castle"), Lake Bell (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Dolly Wells (last seen in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"), Michael Cyril Creighton (ditto), Reid Scott (last seen in "Venom"), P.J. Byrne (last seen in "Rampage"), Ben Sinclair (last seen in "Sisters"), Josh Stamberg (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Jen Kirkman, Paige Cato.
RATING: 5 out of 10 boxes of old screenplays
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